Stop calculating: it is about time to start thinking!

09 July 2024, Version 1
This content is an early or alternative research output and has not been peer-reviewed by Cambridge University Press at the time of posting.

Abstract

The paper is a partly provocative essay edited as a humanitarian study in philosophy of science and social philosophy, reflecting on the practical, “anti-metaphysical” turn taken place since the 20th century and continuing until now. The article advocates that it is about time it to be overcome because it is the main obstacle for the further development of exact and natural sciences including mathematics therefore restoring the unity of philosophy and sciences in the dawn of modern science when the great scientists were philosophers as a necessary condition for their revolutionary achievements, and the physicists were simultaneously mathematicians not less than philosophers and even theologians as Descartes, Newton, Leibnitz were just as their predecessors, Copernicus or Galileo Galilei. The revolution in science accomplished by them needed philosophy since any scientific revolution, then necessarily growing into social, needs philosophy; and if ones wish to prevent social revolutions originating from fundamental scientific discoveries, in turn relying on the close link of sciences and philosophy, they are to cut the link at issue, and just that happened in the 20th centuries therefore implicitly heralding a “brave new world” of eternal normal science without revolutions whether scientific or social. Fukuyama’s “end of history” requires an “end of scientific history” as it is a obligatory premise, and separating sciences from philosophy is sufficient for that, though proclaimed quite otherwise: as overcoming metaphysics preventing sciences and substituting them by quasi-sciences.

Keywords

anti-metaphysical turn in philosophy
demarcation of science to metaphysics
Heidegger
Modernity versus postmodernity
normal science versus scientific revolutions
reasonability versus sociability
science versus society
thinking versus calculation
Wittgenstein

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